CAREER: Designing Autonomous Battery-Free Robotic Sensors

Miniaturized robotic sensors have transformative potential for numerous applications. Unlike fixed Internet of Things sensors designed to take measurements in a specific location, a robot can move to sample different locations. Such robots have potential to perform infrastructure inspection on roadways, bridges, and railroads, track inventory on warehouse shelves, measure environmental conditions on farms, take measurements in industrial scenarios with toxic chemicals or strong electromagnetic fields, or even be used in space exploration.

Robotic sensors could also move to seek out sources of fires or gas leaks. A core component of traditional robots is a battery that provides power and energy. Batteries however limit the time and range at which a robot can operate in remote environments.

Batteries are also difficult to miniaturize for small microrobots, and battery manufacturing and disposal also have significant environmental impacts due to the use of toxic and scarce critical materials. This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) research seeks to develop a new class of maintenance-free robotic sensors powered by energy harvested from sources like light using solar cells or from radio transmitters.

The key enabling idea is to operate these robots in discrete steps which enables motion with small amounts of harvested energy, but achieving this requires redesigning robot mechanisms, circuits, and control algorithms.

This interdisciplinary research will establish fundamental techniques for designing battery-free robots ranging from mechanical components and circuits to control software. By redesigning conventional robot sub-systems for compatibility with energy harvesting this research will contribute to the following: 1) strategies to discretize robot motion co-optimized with electronic and structural energy storage and investigate how these methods scale versus robot size; 2) methods to power robots with novel energy harvesting approaches and optimizing power management algorithms for robot motion. 3) perception capabilities for battery-free robots such as onboard vision or odor classification and explore wirelessly connected multi-robot architectures; 4) explore AI based tools and workflows for robot and embedded system design, code generation, power optimization, and debugging; 5) Develop control systems compatible with intermittent motion.

This research will also be closely coupled to educational experiences for undergraduates and K-12 students through a programmable robot prototyping platform for algorithm development and education. Undergraduate researchers will help develop the robot platform and outreach activities will be conducted in partnership with nonprofit educational organizations such as A Vision for Electronic Literacy and Access.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.